Best settings for VirtualBox with Mac OS X host?

[humdinger70]

Running PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE (final) under VirtualBox 3.1.6 on Mac OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard host. My box has 4Gig RAM.

I have the following settings right now.

Base memory - 1280MB
Processors - 2
VT-x/AMD-V - enabled
Nested Paging - enabled (although the running system disables it)
PAE - enabled
APIC - enabled

Display memory - 48 MB
3D Acceleration - enabled

Any suggestions on tweaking these values? Am I giving the system enough RAM?
Anyway, within PCLinuxOS my 'free' looks like this:

[larry@localhost ~]$ free -m
                      total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:             1263       1204         58          0         74        809
-/+ buffers/cache:         320        943
Swap:             2596          0       2596

[menotu]

Providing giving the VM more ram doesn't make your MAC wobble, I see no harm in giving it more.

Do you swap back and forth between the VM and the MAC? If you are only using the MAC to literally "host" the VM give it the best resources you can. If you use both equally, try balancing things out.

BUT, in saying that, if things are running okay as they are, I'd leave them as is.

[humdinger70]

I reduced the Base memory (from 1536 to 1280) to cut down on resource usage.

So far swap space not used (I have it at 2x base memory). Did I need a swap partition? I've always put one there.

I reduced Display memory (from 64 to 48). Does that have any effect on anything?

I know that I'm not REALLY using the full graphics capability of the nVidia card in my Mac (and that may take an upgrade of VBox to fix it for the Mac platform).

When I'm using my Mac, sometimes I switch back and forth as need be (things like Quicken and my e-mail and news reading I do under Mac OS X).

I'm still a neophyte for Linux so it's nice to have things on one platform.

[menotu]

I know that I'm not REALLY using the full graphics capability of the nVidia card in my Mac (and that may take an upgrade of VBox to fix it for the Mac platform).

Its my understanding that VBox uses its own video driver (i.e it won't be using your nVidia card as such) which is one of the reasons why Compiz or a 3D desktop can't be used.

I'm still a neophyte for Linux so it's nice to have things on one platform

I hear where you coming from - once your confident with PCLOS I'm sure you'll take the plunge and do a "grown-up" install (smiles wickedly)

As for swap space its rarely used nowadays in most modern setups but how VBox access/uses swap I'm not too clear.

As I say, if things are running A-O-K I wouldn't bother tweaking too much (if it ain't broke.....)